The articles and essays in this blog range from the short to the long. Many of the posts are also introductory (i.e., educational) in nature; though, even when introductory, they still include additional commentary. Older material (dating back mainly to 2005) is being added to this blog over time.

Friday, 24 October 2014

Kant on Evidence-transcendence & Reason

According to Immanuel Kant, God is experience- or
evidence-transcendent.
And, in this sense, he agrees with David Hume. According to Kant,
Hume thinks that “we apply only ontological predicates (eternity,
omnipresence, omnipotence)” to God. But what Hume required
were “properties which can yield a concept in
concreto”.
They must be “superadded”. That is, predicates such as eternity,
omnipresence and omnipotence are not intrinsic
properties, they are,
if you like, abilities
of God. What Hume wanted was a criterion
of identity for God,
not simply descriptions
of His abilities and powers.
It’s as if someone were to describe a rose by saying that "it
delights people and is an emblem of love", instead of saying that
roses are red and give off a sweet pungency. These are relational
predicates. Hume was
asking: What is
God? I don’t want to know His
powers or what do he does?
Of course Kant would say that his intrinsic
properties are beyond us because such properties can only be given in
experience. This
prompts the question: Aren’t the properties of omnipotence,
omnipresence also given only in experience? But part of God’s
essence, as it were, is the fact that He
is beyond experience.
And not only that, part of God’s essence for Kant, is that He
is beyond experience.
If we wanted more than this from God, we would, Kant says, be guilty
of “anthropomorphism”; and this is what many theists were guilty
of. So, in a sense, Kant sympathised we Hume’s deism
and sided with him against theism
and all other “anthropomorphisms”. Theism, or at least
anthropomorphism, is for crude God-lovers who somehow project
their own properties or attributes on to God
(as Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were later to elaborate on).
However, despite what has been said, Humean deism is going to far, or
so Kant thinks. Kant’s view of deism is unequivocal. He says,
“nothing can come” of it. Not only that: it “is of no value”
and “cannot serve as any foundation to religion or morals”.
So whereas theism is too
human (“all too
human”?), deism is too
anti-human. Kant
therefore attempted, as ever, to find some kind of middle way between
the two extremes.Though, again, Kant is unhappy
with anthropomorphism (and therefore theism?). We mustn't “transfer
predicates from the world of sense to a being quite distinct from the
world”. The end result of Kant’s vision of God is therefore
quite unequivocal. We must “acknowledge that the Supreme Being is
quite inscrutable and even unthinkable in any determinate way as to
what it is in itself”. God is, therefore, another noumenol
being.Kant agreed with Hume
who thinks that it is wise “not to carry the use of reason
dogmatically beyond the field of all possible experience”.
However, Kant had a problem with this dogmatic attitude towards
reason itself. He thinks that Hume should not “consider the field
of experience as one which bounds itself in the eyes of our reason”. Reason ,therefore, comes to Kant’s rescue again. That is,
reason can take us
beyond “all possible
experience” and give us the means to understand, if not know,
God Himself (in this instance). Indeed Kant calls Hume’s
dogmatism towards reason “scepticism”. And Kant, yet again,
attempts to find “the true mean between dogmatism…and scepticism”. Kant reiterates why he thinks we can transcend experience. He
says that experience “does not bound itself; it only proceeds in
every case from the conditioned to some other equally conditioned
thing”. However, experience’s “boundary must lie quite
without it, and this is the field of the pure beings of the
understanding”. And, of course, it is reason again that takes
us to these “pure beings of the understanding”.It is natural
theology, via reason,
that takes us beyond “the boundary of human reason”. It “looks
beyond this boundary to the idea of a Supreme Being”.And yet again Kant shows us
that there is an illusive bridge between the offerings of experience
and that which is beyond experience. He concedes “that reason by
all it’s a priori
principles never teaches us anything more than objects of possible
experience”. However, this doesn't mean that “this
limitation does not prevent reason from leading us to the objective
boundary of experience, viz., to the reference to something which is
not itself an object of experience but must be the highest ground of
all experience”. However, Kant again concedes that reason
“does not, however, teach us anything concerning the thing in
itself”.So what does reason do? It “only instructs us as
regards its own complete and highest use in the field of possible
experience”. Reason takes us beyond possible experience; though
only into the field of conjecture,
supposition and speculation.
That is, it doesn't give us absolute knowledge
of what lies beyond the boundaries of possible experience.
It does, though, show us the boundaries
themselves and what may lie beyond them.Kant is clear that it is
metaphysics
itself that takes us beyond
the bounds of possible experience.
He says that pure
reason is compelled
“to quite the mere contemplation of nature, to transcend all
possible experience” and to “endeavour to produce the
thing…called metaphysics”. Metaphysics frees “our
concepts from the fetters of experience and from the limits of the
mere contemplation of nature” and allows us into the “field
containing mere objects for the pure understanding which no
sensibility can reach”. It is in passages like this that Kant
shows us how far removed from the tenets of empiricism despite the
fact that he, in a certain sense, fused empiricism and rationalism.
The empiricists believed
that there was no knowledge beyond experience.
Kant agreed. However, Kant believed that metaphysics took
us beyond experience
into the realm of “pure beings” that, nevertheless, could not be
known.
It was these flights of
fancy that traditional
empiricism was against. And indeed, later 20th
century empiricists and the logical empiricists thought that it was
precisely because of these Kantian flights of fancy - even if they didn't claim to give us knowledge - which resulted in metaphysics itself
becoming “meaningless” or “nonsense”. Kant did indeed
strike a balance between the rationalism that had no time at all for
the experiences of the senses and the empiricists who equally had no
time for anything that was putatively beyond
sense experience. Kant
himself criticised Plato for floating off into the ether because he
had no solid moorings in the world of sense.
However, he accused hard-core empiricists like Hume of being
“sceptics”. Was it the case, therefore, that Kant was between a
rock and a hard place; or, as David Lewis put it, “between the rock
of fallibilism and the whirlpool of scepticism” (1996, pg 503).
Does it indeed make sense to talk of what lies beyond sense
experience? Equally, doesn’t empiricism in its hard form annihilate
the very practice of metaphysics
and, ultimately, all philosophy?